Hannah McKie and Alice Miller shortlisted for Adam NZ Play Award
Two MA in Creative Writing graduates are on the 2013 shortlist.
Playmarket's Adam NZ Play Award celebrates the best in new writing for theatre.
Hannah McKie, who holds an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria and is currently a PhD candidate in our creative writing programme, has been shortlisted for 'Mary Scott: Queen of the Backblocks', which she is writing as part of her PhD thesis. The play explores a boom time in New Zealand theatre written and produced by women – the heyday of the British Drama League's one-act play festivals. Four dedicated and determined teams of women from different parts of the country – playwrights, actors and directors – rehearse new New Zealand work in a race against time, budget, sexism, philistinism, the Second World War, inter- and intra-team rivalry and a general lack of conviction that anything happens in a New Zealand woman's life worth writing about – before coming head to head in the national final. Will Ngaio Marsh win the cash prize? Has Nola Millar lost her team's return train fare on a horse? Will backblocks writer Mary Scott's move into theatre (by putting her own life story on stage) be a success? Or are all these intrepid women dramatists fated to go unrecognised and unrewarded when the boys come marching home?
Poet, essayist and fiction writer Alice Miller, who holds an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria and an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, is shortlisted for her first play 'Native Affairs'. Set in Wellington in 1881, 'Native Affairs' is the story of newspaper proprietor and man-about-town Bryce Forster, whose bid to become the next Premier is stymied by his estranged wife, his own stubbornness and a new temptation who saunters into his life. Pretty, ambitious and with an eye for facts, Eliza also catches the eye of Forster's adopted son Will, who is convinced that his father's push for another military campaign against Maori will jeopardise his political career.
The full shortlist is here. The winner will be announced in early April, followed by a rehearsed reading of the winning play at Circa.